Stephen Koukoulas

It's where your future lies.

planning is.

Shall we ramp up our construction of another warehouse?

Shall we hire more people to run our retail distribution centre?

These sorts of things.

And for the here and now, so here we are, middle of April, as I said,

They might be put on the back burner for a short while until we see what the effects of this oil shock are.

For us consumers, we tend to be a little bit more agile.

We tend to react more quickly.

We've had the two rate hikes just to go on top of the petrol shock.

So people react quite quickly.

And by that, I mean a few months rather than 12 months to the fact that their monthly cash flows are being sort of undermined by, well, the rate hikes and the petrol shock.

And for the here and now, this is sort of the dilemma that we economists have.

We have got to react to these numbers when they come out.

And they are – they're not good.

They're bad.

But as we were sort of saying, if we get the change coming through from the international economy in a positive way –

If we get things like the Reserve Bank acknowledging that we're going to be perhaps a little bit cautious on the need to hike quite as much, that's obviously a hot debate for the early May RBA monetary policy meeting.

And if we get – because last week, too, we saw quite positive numbers from the Chinese economy.

Chinese GDP was 5%, which was stronger than expected.